Travel in 2023

 As I've written elsewhere we've just been to Europe for a few weeks.

Many things were different from pre pandemic travel - like that the use of cash had disappeared.

Yes cabs and informal market vendors preferred cash, as did cafes in Italy if all you wanted was a couple of espresso lungos, but in the main Europe had gone cashless. Having a low cost debit card such as our ING bank cards proved invaluable, as did having a second debit card, this time from HSBC, for dealing with self service petrol pumps and automated motorway toll stations - I have a paranoia about one of these machines swallowing my card.

In the even all the motorway toll plazas accepted contactless payments and the self service petrol pumps proved reliable - none of the fun and games we had in Portugal a few years ago where selfservice pumps would randomly take a dislike to an overseas card and spit them back out in disgust.

We did use trains and planes, and where possible we preprinted our tickets before we left.

Telstra has this absolutely stupid way of charging a flat $10 fee  per day for roaming which made downloading tickets to our phones an expensive exercise - although we did take a phone with roaming enabled, and installed the various train booking apps on it in case one of the scanners along the way didn't like one of our printouts.

I guess we could have download the tickets over wifi prior to travelling, and stored them in a wallet application, but to be honest, I didn't think of that, especially as I didn't realise that French train stations now need you to scan your ticket prior to boarding - Italy is still old school with train conductors who carry what looks like a modified phone to scan your ticket.

The Oppo phone performed excellently, and Belong's roaming coverage was so good we didn't need to buy a second local SIM card.

In fact I was so impressed with the Oppo's performance, especially with 5G, that when we got back to Australia I decided to ditch my pandemic era iPhone SE and use the Oppo as my phone, and sell my iPhone to a refurbisher, there being a healthy market in old iPhones, even the lowly 4G only SE.

(Incidentally I don't regret the iPhone SE purchase - it did its job, and did it well, but having used a more advanced phone like the Oppo, its limitations were self evident)

Our rental car in Italy for some reason didn't have a GPS, instead you were supposed to pair your phone with it over Bluetooth. Belong's data allowances proved more than adequate for getting us to and from rural Tuscany.

Google maps did get us lost in Siena - I suspect it lost the signal and directed us round in a loop. Restarting the phone cured the problem.

Airports almost universally used self service machines that scanned your passport and then retrieved your booking allowing you to both print your boarding pass and check your bags, and with the exception of Marseilles all the airports had smart gates with facial recognition. In Marseilles we had to line up old style and have our passports stamped.

Interestingly, in Bologna, while they had smart gates they still had a pair of border guards in a booth solely to put an exit stamp in your passport.

Britain and Singapore no longer required any entry and exit stamps, although Singapore did need you to fill in an online form in advance, basically replacing the old arrivals card that you used to have to complete.

The other thing that I found surprising was the pervasiveness across Europe of Whatsapp as a communication mechanism, especially in rural Tuscany where sometimes mobile phone coverage was surprisingly poor, but wifi was everywhere ...